


sine qua non

by asfroste



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Break Up, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-31 04:08:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6455059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asfroste/pseuds/asfroste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years pass.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sine qua non

**Author's Note:**

> this is both sad and self-indulgent. unbeta'd. ngozi is the amazing creator of Check, Please! and I'm honestly just grateful it exists.

Years pass.

*

Years pass and Eric is fine. He dates, hooks up, does what he wants without thinking too much about it. He muddles through his mid-twenties like the internet expects those in their mid-twenties to muddle through. He figures out his life slowly, trying different jobs, refusing to pressure himself into figuring out what he wants from it. It’s not as hard as he thought it would be, but it’s also nothing like he thought it would be when he was 21, 22, in love with an NHL star, in love with the life they could lead, in love with the idea of forever.

Forever isn’t something you find in college, and it takes Eric a few years to realize and accept that. It takes longer for it to stop hurting, but that’s normal.

*

Jack kisses Eric at graduation, and it feels like a promise, a start. It feels like forever stretching out ahead of him.

*

Years pass.

*

They had their life, their perfect slice of it. An apartment, shared. Two cars, a fish tank, together at last and happy. Eric had never had a lot of expectations about what his life would be like, about what he wanted in a relationship. He’d always stopped his daydreams before they got too far, his heart beating too fast, the thought of Coach—of anyone—he always stopped before he got too far ahead. He didn’t know what to expect, but he believed in love, believed blindly in a lot of things he heard from love songs but had no experience with in reality.

He can’t say they didn’t try; they did. It just wasn’t enough.

*

Years pass. Eric gets very good at deflecting questions about his personal life from his mother, who worries, and slightly better at pretending it doesn’t hurt that his father doesn’t ask the same questions.

He doesn’t follow Jack’s career any more than he has to; he doesn’t keep in touch with his Samwell friends beyond Facebook and infrequent meetups. There’s no reason for it; that’s just life. They’ve all gone their separate ways. What happens in college isn’t enough to define the rest of anyone’s life, and that’s fine, it’s normal. Eric never wanted his college memories to be his peak—who would?

Years pass and the memories of the Haus fade, the jokes and the parties and the constant communication. They scatter, all of them, happy to check back in when they can, but this is the reality: there is no forever. There is no ideal world in which everything that happened in college spelled the future out for them.

Instead, there was everyone gamely promising that it wouldn’t be like that, there were honest confessions of love and friendship that seemed like they could stand the test of time, and Eric looks back and wishes he could hand his younger self the truth and shake him, a little, for trusting the lies that college taught him to believe.

*

Years pass and the memories become less bitter. Not just of Jack, and their time together, but all of Samwell. Eric builds a new life, an adult life, and he swears that he’s happy. He’s managed to check off enough boxes on his congrats-you’re-a-grown-up-now list that he knows he should be more than happy, should be celebrating this life he’s built. It should be enough. It doesn’t feel like it.

*

Eric thinks, _does life even have a peak?_ Is there a point where everyone turns to face themselves in the mirror and thinks, _this is exactly what I should be doing, I am finally where I expected to be?  Has everything I’ve suffered lead me to this place?_ And the immediate follow up thought is, _what does it mean that I’m here now? What does that mean for the rest of my life?_

*

They tried, and it wasn’t enough. They all tried, in their own ways, but.

*  
  
Years pass.

*

Eric was 20 and Jack was 25. Those five years were nothing and everything at the same time. When Eric hits 25, he thinks back, and still can’t find any perspective that maybe matches Jack’s. Can’t remember enough of what he was like even five years ago to justify why they thought they knew what they were getting into. It feels blurred by the passage of time and the weight of the emotion he’s tried and tried again to bury deep. He thinks he was naïve and wants to feel ashamed but at the same time, it is the normal curse of youth to think that everything is set at 20, that the rest of life will just trot out neatly and line up prettily. Everyone does it. There’s nothing for him to be ashamed of.

*

Years pass and Eric really only gets maudlin when he drinks too much, when he’s single and alone on his couch late at night and feeling sorry for himself. He spends a lot of his time making sure this doesn’t happen too often, actually, and it doesn’t, but once he admits to himself that his life isn’t what he pictured, when he pictured anything at all, it’s hard to shake.

*

They fell apart the same way every other couple does: in bits and pieces, until there wasn’t enough left to stake their happiness on going further. Until it was time to admit that no amount of changing on either part would make a difference; time to admit that neither wanted to change overmuch, out of a combination of stubbornness and the pervasive idea that one person should never change just for their loved one, that love should just change you naturally, and other bullshit.

It didn’t matter, in the end, which came quietly. They bowed to the inevitable and Eric silently packed up his stuff over a week while Jack was out at practice and that was it. They aren’t explosive people; their relationship reached its natural conclusion for a college relationship and that was it. They tried to build a life together until they couldn’t anymore, until their two paths diverged. Isn’t that how it works for everyone?

Eric had obsessed over it, trying to track the line between ‘normal’ and ‘happy,’ trying to understand. He thinks he was too young and Jack too busy; they were both too quiet, too distant. He wants to be fair, has resisted placing the blame solely on one of them for all the years since they broke up, but he still doesn’t have a complete answer as to why they didn’t last.

*

Years pass and Eric dates. He meets a guy he thinks he loves, but. He has good relationships, _but_. He hates it, hates thinking that he’s wasted all this time on Jack. That’s not how real life works. He wants to go back and rip away the good parts of their relationship and think of only the bad times, the stretches of stony silence and the awkward conversations that went nowhere, the frustration that spiraled under both their skins. They’ve barely spoken in all the years since; there was nothing left to say. He wants to push the blame fully onto Jack or onto himself, and he can’t. It’s not that simple. Nothing ever is, not in any break-up, not in any natural part of life, but. _But_.

Eric is closer to 30 now than ever before and it is looking a lot scarier than he ever thought it would be. Eric is tired of conversations with his mother about husbands and grandchildren, and tired of measuring every new boyfriend up against the guy he thought he’d be with forever when he was 22 and he’s so tired, in general. He’s only 29 and he’s tired, it’s absurd, he knows it is, but he can’t help it.

*

There is no such thing as fate.

*

Years pass.

*

Eric doesn’t message Jack on Facebook, or on anything else. He doesn’t strike up a conversation over text. He doesn’t call the number he never could bring himself to delete. He is an adult. He can deal with his loneliness and his wishful thinking, just like he has been for years. Years, it’s been years, this is utterly ridiculous.

Still, he dreads the thought of getting that invitation in the mail, … _and Jack Laurent Zimmermann request your presence at_. Even worse, the headline plastered over the internet, _Jack Zimmermann finally ties the knot!_ Worst, _worst_ , for Jack to call him up in person and say that he hopes Eric is well, it’s been so long, won’t he please come, it would mean so much. Eric could drive himself crazy thinking about it, and at this point he probably will.

*

There is no such thing as fate. There is a dark, uncrossable abyss between decision and action. There are numerous realistic reasons as to why he and Jack will never meet again and Eric spends his life in one doomed relationship after another. 

Eric doesn’t like the odds, so he ignores them as best he can, balancing precariously on the edge of indecision.

*

Years have passed. Years have passed, and.

Eric knows this much: Jack has had a great run; in an ideal world, he’s won as many Stanley Cups as his father and scored more points overall. Regardless, Jack turns 38 and announces his retirement from the NHL. Eric buys a ticket to Jack’s last game. He’s not the only one. There is an abnormally large group of Samwell Hockey alumni there, not by accident, and Eric is glad to see them all. The rush of nostalgia belies a deeper fondness that makes Eric sorry he didn’t stay in touch better, that blocks out all the doubts he ever had and reminds him how much he loved his life with these people in it.

They’ve all taken shameless advantage of knowing Jack to get great seats and passes that enable them to creep around behind the bench to the Falconer’s locker room, tipsy and laughing, and god, they’re all too old for this, but it is honestly so fun that Eric can’t help himself.

They surprise Jack in the middle of the press conference and his face lights up in a way that makes the lines around his eyes and mouth disappear. He sheds ten years when he sees Eric and Shitty and Adam and Justin—Larissa is just out of sight and the younger generation decided to wait in the hallway, but they’re here, finally, all of them together in the same place for the first time in over 10 years.

*

Years have passed. Years have passed and the memories of looking up into Jack’s soft, droopy eyes, of lining their bodies up and pressing his mouth to Jack’s for a kiss, of holding hands at the breakfast table—they haven’t faded entirely to nothing, no matter how much Eric wishes otherwise. He’s just pushed them down.

He resists it, resists the idea that he’s giving into this in the end, because there is no ‘the end.’ He knows better than to think of things in beginnings and ends, in starts and stops, in stories that have a clear plot from ‘once upon a time’ to ‘they lived happily ever after.’ He wants a continuation instead of a fairy tale.

Fairy tales are not how real life works; Eric knows that now. Years have passed and the wounds have healed. He knows this isn’t soulmates or college sweethearts or the perfect storybook romance. They’ve lived their lives apart for longer than they were together; they can’t just fall back into what they had. Eric doesn’t want what they had. He’s not sure at all that it’s worth it to try again for something else.

*

But.

*

Years have passed. This isn’t a story that has a clear cut beginning and end. This isn’t as easy as all that. But. Years have passed and the wounds have healed. Jack’s eyes meet his and there is a warmth there that Eric recognizes. He thinks _, maybe_.

*

“Hi,” Eric says, a little breathless despite himself. Jack smiles, lopsided, his eyes just as bright when he was 25 and looking at Eric in a new light for what felt like the first time.

“Hello,” Jack says.

 

**Author's Note:**

> sine qua non (or condicio sine qua non) is a latin legal term that means 'without which there is nothing' or 'without which there is no condition' (because I'm a latin teacher and it's important to be as literal as possible while translating). fun fact: I decided that would be the title about ten seconds before I posted this.
> 
> I sometimes have Terrible Suspicious Feelings about what will happy to Jack and Bitty down the road and this is the result of me getting drunk and maudlin enough to write about it.
> 
> I'm on twitter (barely) as asfroste@hashtagfanfic. thank you for reading!


End file.
